


for an additional $4.49

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anxiety, F/M, First "I love you", Infatuation Period, May The Fourth 2019, Maybe the fluffiest thing I have written, Midnight Premiere, New Relationship, Soft Kylo Ren, Stupid Meta, Those Twenty Dollar Collectible Popcorns Tins That I Stupidly Want, mentions of anxiety attacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-25 23:35:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18711970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: Rey has an existential crisis over love and collectible popcorn tins while at the midnight premiere of the last film of her favorite trilogy.





	for an additional $4.49

Rey has not mastered the various ins and outs of measuring a person’s love.

She’s not been in love often, or deeply, or long enough now to know if this time is to be held to a reduced or enlarged ratio of subtlety. She and Kylo have only been together a few months, and the relationship started off on rocky enough footing. 

Friends-with-benefits is a weird term when they certainly weren’t exactly friends first. Or even friendly. Just attracted and young and bored and killing time in the fall when it feels like you have the whole rest of the school year to figure things out.

They’re getting to know each other. 

He seemingly  _ loves _ kissing her, which is nice. They make out in her apartment during her time off, her baggy tees and ripped jeans a stark contrast to his elegant black clothes. It gives it the dressing of an affair with someone they are both not supposed to be with. This is not the slow exploration of two people meeting on a date with the aim of being on a date, nor is it established friends who know so much now using that knowledge to cheat the game of intimacy. Sex is enough of a frantic mash to not have to be sincere yet, even though it is, even though their heart beats always end up slow and lazy against each other when they’re supposed to be banging on her couch at three in the afternoon on a Sunday.

They sort of knew each other. Sort of had ideas. 

But went very slowly in that exploration. 

She always watches him carefully while he talks, his dark eyes focused on the leaves-strewn sidewalk in front of them, and she decides that even if she doesn’t like him, she did want to understand him.

The depths of Kylo’s love may be a territory unexplored; but she’s dipped a few toes in.

Rose said it first, low and surprised, when Kylo was dropping of lunch for her between classes a few weeks ago. A sweet gesture, a genuinely kind one, stemmed from her complaining the night before about time management for that day. Her heart was still pounding from the surprise of the personal burger delivery, and she and Rose were picking through the bagged feast with impressed sounds.

_"That man is in love with you,"_ Rose intoned sagely when he was out of earshot, heading back to his car because he did this during his own lunch break, like it was the most excessive of feelings Kylo contained. 

Rey wrinkled her nose and dismissed it at the time.

A midnight premiere is no small task from him. 

He has expressed in no uncertain terms he has social anxiety: but he has never gone into specifics. Crowds, stress, being the center of attention...what his no-fly-zones are as mysterious as the rest of…

_ Her boyfriend.  _

She looks down at her reserved-months-in-advanced tickets in her hand. 

They’ve been doing this since the fall, so he must really be her boyfriend by now. 

She’s brought him along to this premiere, so he might actually matter to her more than she knew, and she’s only realizing this as she digs the  _ very sacred  _ tickets out of her purse. 

She didn’t expect this to be the result of his gently stroking her skin through the rips of her jeans with his talented fingers a few weeks back. Making her moan just from teasing, and his eyes flickering around her room until they landed on her new poster and him blurting out, for something to talk about, if she was seeing it  _ right when it came out.  _

_ Of course, _ she responded, and without meaning to made him her date for the evening. 

It’s chaotic. She’d warned him a million times it would be. It’s the last film of a trilogy and fans are ravenous. In fact, maybe she should have invited Finn instead; Kylo said he’d seen the originals growing up, maybe caught the other two on a plane or when they came out on streaming, and this is a night for hardcore feelings about this event that he clearly does not possess like she does. He looks wary of the thirst for blood. 

The crowd is restless, and he doesn’t do well with  _ restless.  _

With a profound sense of pain, as soon as they walk into the theater she can sense how this is going to go.

“Kylo,” she says once, but he doesn’t hear her. 

She can be selfish. She can chicken out of offering, ignore his discomfort, take what she wants out of this situation.

But she grabs his coat sleeve instead.

“Kylo,” she waits until his wide eyes lock on hers, “Kylo, we can go.”

It is absolutely killer to say that: but she has to offer. She tries to quell the disappointment in her tone like it’s not a big deal, and it shouldn’t be. She can be convincing. Like she dressed up like her favorite character just to come here, take one look around, and then immediately go home. 

They don’t really talk about it. That she sort-of-saw one of his anxiety attacks. That she gets why he’d rather make out in her apartment than go someplace loud and exciting. He’s a massive homebody, despite loathing his own place, so it is pleasing to the secret nester in her that someone wants to be in her space and observe and exist. He once expressed that what little she had seen that one time was the tail end of the worst of an anxiety attack for him, the emotionally leaky phase, and not the wind-up to when it was really bad. And that made her heart hurt. That it was worse than she thought. She didn’t want it to be any worse than the afternoon they shared with her petting his head cuddled on her lap, too numb to answer a lot of questions while she floundered with suggestions for what to do to help make him feel better. 

Kylo blinks at her, stunned, and shakes his head. He glances around the crowded movie theater like he’s double checking for a phantom seen from the corner of her eye that was never really there. 

He had tried to explain it, once, and he was explaining it so carefully. Time was something that felt precious, his boss encroaching on so much of it nowadays, that tight schedules and waiting around and having it wasted was almost an intimate form of murder to him. 

“So that voice in your head that’s supposed to say  _ ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ _ just doesn’t work?”

He looked at her, his mouth hanging open in surprise.

“Yes, it’s sort of like that,” he agreed, falling into step beside her on the leave-strewn sidewalk with a new sense of purpose, “but it’s like instead there’s a voice answering that has a million bad responses to that question talking louder. It builds from there. Everything can go wrong.”

She remembers that afternoon every day. She wants to tell him nothing bad is going to happen here. 

He’s putting her happiness above his comfort. 

She keeps staring up at him. 

She’s putting his comfort above her happiness. 

“It’s okay,” she insists, pushing at him gently, “if you want to go home.”

He shakes his head more firmly this time.

“Of course we’re doing this,” he cracks a shy smile. There is a growing confidence there. Because she’s new to his anxiety, she doesn’t know how to navigate it, and it seems that all he needs to know is that someone is keeping track of him. Making sure he’s alright. 

He’s somewhat glowing at the implication that she’d willingly give this up,  _ tonight, the crazed excitement, _ if he really needed her to.

She was ready to leave for him. 

So he was going to stay for her.

They get to the concession stand, which she wants to avoid, but he gets strangely insistent that they have the full experience so she lets him face his demons head on even though she's had more than enough of making him do that tonight. And she sees it, heaped on top of a tall tower to catch the eye. It glimmers in the lights surrounding the signs advertising food and drinks.

The tin is a beacon of all that is wrong in the world. It is _wrong._

But it is  _ shiny.  _

And has her favorite set of graphics from the posters.

She stares at it intently. 

$24.99 for a popcorn tin was maybe the most insulting thing she had even born witness to. It would take more than two hours of work to earn that after tax deductions. It was an insult to her intelligence that existed, available for a limited time and one Stubs card.

Kylo is holding her hand in that extremely focused way, working it around in his huge palm. Hand-holding is supposed to be an absent thing, but it never is with him, not since she distractedly shoved her fingers through his so they wouldn’t get separated walking through a street that had been clogged by a parade on a walk home this Autumn. 

He had always made it into an examination, a living thing, and it made her feel strange. But good.

Kylo squeezes her hand, maybe to get her attention, but she is so busy staring at that stupid commemorative tin she doesn’t notice right away. 

Things like that don’t decay. This night would always be remembered as it shone down from her bookshelf. The stupidest part of her brain wants because it is shiny and dumb. 

“You want it?” Kylo whispers, and it is so sincere that she would have filled in  _ it _ with almost any other thing in the world than the stupid popcorn tin, mostly because she thinks if he meant that he’d say it while laughing at her. 

Maybe she had expected a more earnest declaration; at least one stating his point more obviously. This act does not lack earnestness, she can be assured, as he slides over his credit card like it’s a code to get into a secret society and the teenager behind the counter hefts the Holy Popcorn Grail into her waiting hands. 

“For an additional $4.49 you get unlimited refills,” the teenager parrots automatically, the repetition of the phrase rendering it useless in meaning. As though he’s been saying it and everyone has very smartly turned down the offer.

The foster kid in her is rendered frozen. Not only was the stupid tin ungodly in how overpriced it was, this upcharge hits like a slap in the face. Kylo already can’t be happy about this, so why are they making it worse? Somehow dropping twenty bucks on a  _ thing, _ at least a tangible object, is dwarfed by an add-on  _ privilege _ one must pay for. 

Kylo merely glances down at her with a question poised on his brow. He’s got his wallet held open like he needs to wait for the order to be given before proceeding. 

She doesn’t answer, because she feels sick over pushing too hard. Somehow, this gesture breaks her, he has shouldered the globe for her like a man and someone is adding on the weight of its orbiting moon on top of it. 

She is actually shaking in an AMC theater, forgetting why she’s here, and the exciting occasion that it is.

“It’s...not worth it…” she murmurs, her face hot, and something in him goes rigid.

He turns back to the counter. His voice is authoritative.

“We’re sharing, so it seems like the best deal.”

It certainly is not. It is absurd. It is exploitative. It is everything wrong with capitalism.

He gives a nod to the cashier.

A subtle nod.

Then it all happens so fast. The employee taps the screen and a receipt un-scrolls and Kylo signs away his name and Rey is holding the tin with the suddenly oppressive-smell of popcorn curling into her nostrils. 

He slides an arm around her shoulders and guides her to the theater: it’s not that he  _ can’t  _ do what he just did, it’s that she doesn’t want to make him.

She stress-eats half the popcorn before the trailers come on. It’s not a relieving feeling, or a particularly hungry one, that she devours so much to the point of feeling queasy. 

They have to get one refill, don’t they? This opens so many sources of conflict. One could easily bathe a toddler in this thing. 

He curls his big hand around her trembling, butter-drenched one.

“You okay?”

She nods, still eating steadily until he reaches for the tin in her lap and tilts it towards the dim pre-seating light.

"You don't have to eat it all," he watches her with those serene dark eyes, though sharp underneath with a little edgy concern, "I just wanted to make you happy."

She bows her head, staring at the quicksand of popcorn and fake yellow butter that threatens to drown her bruised heart.

"It just..." she shakes her head, "it was really nice. Too nice, actually."

This, being the problem, appeases Kylo. He leans back in his seat. He likes movies. Even likes seeing them in theaters. Once they're out of the chaos of the lobby, the specialness of the occasion seems more sacred between them. He's very relaxed now. 

“What are you going to do with your bucket?”

Rey clenches her eyes shut.

“You really, really shouldn’t have,” she tries to give him a scolding look, but she’s a little raw from what he just did for her. 

He merely shrugs. “You could display it,” he muses, like she didn’t even chastise him, “you could fill it with LEGOs.”

This knocks her out of her simmering, capitalism-compliant guilt. 

“LEGOs?”

“My dad got me one of these,” he touches the metal lip of the container, “for the originals. That’s what I used it for.”

She crunches her popcorn with renewed vigor. “Did he choose that instead of sending you to college?”

He nudges her with his elbow and snorts.

“It’s  _ collectible,” _ he insists, for someone with little to no care about the movie itself and has been only been basking in the blinding glow of her excitement for weeks, he sounds very authoritative in that inherent value, “we’ll give it to our children someday.”

“And is that how we’ll tell them why mommy and daddy can’t afford a house?”

And she freezes again, having played along with a promise that feels too heavy for whatever light and breakable thing this is between them. The future unscrolls.  _ What’s the worst that could happen _ hangs out in front of her like an abyss because there is no answer. 

But it holds the weight when he laughs gently, without pressuring, and kisses her cheek.

“We can always  _ live _ in the popcorn tin.”

She dips back for what seems like also a kiss and instead bites his shoulder. He laughs harder, a soft raining series of vocal creaks, and then the lights go off and the theater goes wild. 

“Thank God,” she’s surprised to hear Kylo say, “in two hours you will have seen this movie and it’ll be finished. You were getting way too jumpy in the lead-up. I love you, but you were.”

They both go still in the darkness, a trailer filling the pregnant silence.

So he does. 

She can’t argue because she’s practically twitching now, but introducing the depth of his love to her on what will probably be the most emotional night she’s had in years is kind of a dick move. 

She dips close to kiss him anyway. 

It’s better with him here. And maybe that’s what it is in the end. 

The smallness of the satisfaction being enough. 

**Author's Note:**

> I have so many TLJ Popcorn Tins saved on my eBay watchlist that are even more expensive than the addition $4.49 so the only Star Wars Nerd I am roasting here is myself.


End file.
